Reading Of Ancient Texts Research Articles

Fuentes embriagantes americanas en antiguos escritos italianos

Objetivo: identificar de los escritos italianos más antiguos que se conocen la información acerca del uso de fuentes embriagantes empleadas por las poblaciones nativas del Nuevo Mundo. Metodología: búsqueda y atenta lectura de textos antiguos fechados a partir del final del siglo XV. Resultados: se evalúan los textos de Pietro Martire D’Anghiera, donde aparecen noticias del empleo del polvo alucinógeno para inhalar, llamado cohoba entre los antiguos indios taínos. El idioma de estos textos es el latín (1511) y el italiano a partir de 1534. Esta nueva datación implica una prioridad cronológica europea hasta ahora poco reconocida y que se pretende reevaluar con este estudio. Asimismo, se identifica el primer dibujo occidental de un hombre que inhala polvos embriagantes, en una obra de Salvatore Gilii fechada en 1781. Finalmente, se describen las primeras referencias a la ayahuasca en escritos italianos, a partir de una obra de 1850 de Gaetano Osculati.

Civilization and Nature: A Reading of Ancient Texts

Civilization and Nature: A Reading of Ancient Texts

Deconstructing the Ancients/Moderns Trope in Historical Reception

Notably since Thomas Hobbes, canonically with Benjamin Constant, and conventionally amid Nietzschean, Popperian, Straussian, Arendtian, liberal (sc. Madison, Mill, Berlin, Rawls, Vlastos, Hansen), republican (sc. Skinner), political (sc. Finley), and sociological (sc. Ober) readings of ancient texts, contemporary scholarship on the ancients often has employed some version of the dichotomous ancient/modern or ancient/contemporary contrast as a template for explaining, understanding, and interpretively appropriating ancient texts and political practices – particularly those of ancient Greek philosophy and democracy (although Roman ideas and practices also have been invoked). In particular, this has been done to argue for some conception of political ethics and democracy. I argue that this rhetorical trope, often using Athens and Europe/America as synecdoches for antiquity and modernity, has generated narrow and distorted views of ancient texts and political practices, on the one hand, and their contemporary relevance, on the other – views that misinterpret the theoretical significance of historical phenomena and misread the potential lessons of ancient authorities. Instead, texts and practices should be read either with more qualifications or more fully against a historical dynamic of critical philosophy and political power – including its ethical, cultural, institutional, and governing elements – that is not framed by this dichotomy.

The impact of usingMemriseon student perceptions of learning Latin vocabulary and on long-term memory of words

During my PGCE I had a class of eight students in Year 11 studying for the OCR GCSE in Latin who had to master knowledge of 475 words for their exams. Their recent unseen translations demonstrated weak performances due to poor vocabulary knowledge. On interviewing the students, most lacked a systematic approach to learning vocabulary. Since the end-goal of studying Latin today is more often the reading of ancient texts, the requirements for vocabulary learning differs from that of other languages. Composing sentences in Latin is an increasingly rare skill too. Thus by rarely needing to produce Latin, students have no means of actively practising the language. Whilst students often find learning vocabulary arduous, I found that with Latin students find it particularly difficult to retain knowledge. In the school the GCSE Latin lessons are teacher-led and mostly involve the dissemination of information for the students to record and process. The pressure of covering the exam syllabus and difficulty of integrating vocabulary activities into this class led me to the possible solution presented byMemrise.

Poétiques archipéliques : Saint-John Perse et Édouard Glissant

This article links Saint-John Perse’s and Edouard Glissant ‘s poetics via the image and reality of the archipelago concluding that their imaginaries of the island are more mythic than imaginary. Their poietic archipelagos are defined against the traditional symbolisms they denounce. Arguing in favour of a new reading of ancient texts both Saint-John Perse and Glissant advocate that Hellenic archipelity should be stripped of its humanist and romanticist supremacy. Moreover both poets argue against the West’s collective archipelagian imaginary, still largely based on colonizing utopia from the past.Finally, archipelagian poetics are bound to a plurality of genres: Glissant’s work encompassing all forms of writing, Saint-John Perse’s being pluralistic and disparate. Their writings connect intertextually, each text-island communicating with its siblings while preserving its irreducibility.

A construção do feminino: olhares cruzados (com leitura de novo poema de Safo)

The feminine in Antiquity is the chief theme of the present issue of Euphrosyne; without meaning to take advantage of the theme, we want to present these analysis as a reading of ancient texts with a view to singling out the presentation of women in ancient literature, at an important philological moment when a new poem of Sappho emerges as a divine gift, which is here presented for the first time in Portuguese.

Review of: Peter Euben, Platonic Noise, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2003, 232 S.

The book has three primary concerns: first, to show how the reading of ancient texts could provide a solution to current political and ethical problems; second, to ask how literary text could improve the understanding of scientific questions, especially those of political theory; and third, to demonstrate how Plato’s dialogues could be read without becoming a post-modern “white noise”. Following an introduction (ch. 1) and methodological considerations (ch. 2), each of chapters 3-7 contrasts at least one classical text with a modern one (ch. 3: Sophocles and Hanna Arendt; ch. 4: Aristophanes and TV comedies; ch. 5: Sophocles, Plato, Homer, Macchiavelli and the Vietnam war; ch. 6: ancient texts on democracy and Martha Nussbaum; and ch. 7: Plato’s “Phaedo” and Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”). The review ends with three problems of Euben’s hermeneutical methodology.

Downs and Acrosses: Textual Markup on a Stroke Level

Textual encoding is one of the main focuses of Humanities Computing. However, existing encoding schemes and initiatives focus on ‘text’ from the character level upwards, and are of little use to scholars, such as papyrologists and palaeographers, who study the constituent strokes of individual characters. This paper discusses the development of a markup system used to annotate a corpus of images of Roman texts, resulting in an XML representation of each character on a stroke by stroke basis. The XML data generated allows further interrogation of the palaeographic data, increasing the knowledge available regarding the palaeography of the documentation produced by the Roman Army. Additionally, the corpus was used to train an Artificial Intelligence system to effectively ‘read’ in stroke data of unknown text and output possible, reliable, interpretations of that text: the next step in aiding historians in the reading of ancient texts. The development and implementation of the markup scheme is introduced, the results of our initial encoding effort are presented, and it is demonstrated that textual markup on a stroke level can extend the remit of marked up digital texts in the humanities.

Models in Legal History: The Case of Biblical Law

You don't have to be a postmodernist—and I am not—to take the view that the reading of ancient texts by legal historians cannot be “innocent.” All meaning is constructed: texts do not “make sense;” we attribute sense to them. And the sense we attribute is in part a function of the resources we bring to that process. Necessarily, we bring culturally contingent assumptions. We may not be able to rid ourselves of such assumptions, and restore ourselves to that state of innocence which traditionally has been identified with “objectivity.” But we can seek to lay bare those assumptions to the maximum possible degree, so that we can subject them to some process of evaluation (a process, no doubt, whose own assumptions should be subjected, equally, to critical examination).If we ask what kind of assumptions the legal historian brings to ancient texts, the most ready answer would, no doubt, be assumptions regarding typical models of legal development. We can certainly identify the operation of assumptions of this kind in the modern literature relating to biblical law. The argument of this paper, however, will be that it is not sufficient to confine ourselves, for this purpose, to “models of legal development.” That very notion encompasses more general issues—what is law? what is development?—which themselves fall for examination.

Socio-rhetorical interpretaion in practice: Recent contribuions in perspective<Sup>1<Sup>

Socio-rhetorical analysis of the gospels focuses on a specific text's strategy and situation. As such, it is interested in what any given text wanted to communicate (ideology) in its original socio-historical and socio-cultural situaion. In this article attenion is given to contibuions in a recent publicaion entitled Gospe linterpretation: Narrative-critical and social-scientiic approaches (with Kingsbury as editor) that has as focus what can be described as a socio-rhetoricalanalysis of the gospels, that is, readings of the gospels that aim to integrate narrative-critical and sociological readings of the gospels. Ater a few introductory remarks, some of the contribuions in the above-mentioned publicaion are summarized and then evaluaed in terms of their own explicitly stated aim, that is, to read the gospels from a socio-rhetoical perspective. Finally, a few remarks are made concerning both the necessiy for a socio-rhetoical reading of ancient texts and the possibilities that a socio-rhetorical analysis of ancient texts holds for gospel interpretain.

The Mistress-Slave Dialectic: Paradoxes of Slavery in Three Lxx Narratives

This article considers representations of relations between slave-owning women and the women they enslave in three LXX narratives—Susanna, Tobit and Judith. Like other narratives from the ancient Mediterranean world, these narratives perpetuate the attitudes that slave-owners held towards their slaves. The article takes a methodolo gical cue from classical scholars who have attempted 'symptomatic' or 'diagnostic' readings of ancient texts that represent slaves and slavery. In addition, the article examines a narrative written by a former slave in the nineteenth century to highlight the limitations of making assumptions about slaves' attitudes or experiences based on a text written by a slave-owner.

Theory and practice in Renaissance textual criticism: Beatus Rhenanus between conjecture and history

Recent Renaissance research has placed great stress on the importance of textual criticism and attitudes toward classical texts as a basis for understanding the ideas of the Renaissance humanists. John D'Amico turns to the German humanist, Beatus Rhenanus, and forms exciting new opinions about his work. Beatus was a close associate of Erasmus and learned much from the celebrated Dutch scholar, yet his critical method marked a break with Erasmus because he articulated a strict manuscript-based procedure for extracting new readings of ancient texts. His attempt to be faithful to the classical manuscripts he edited was not always successful, but he assuredly understood the use of textual criticism for historical studies and was, D'Amico claims, the most accomplished historian of the German Renaissance. Not only Renaissance historians but also literary critics, students of historiography and of German history and literature, and classicists will find this book illuminating.